The Samsung Galaxy S4 Android phone. / Jason DeCrow, AP

by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

by Rob Pegoraro, Special for USA TODAY

A: That's an excellent question - my own phone has this feature, and I hardly ever use it.

NFC - shorthand for the impressively vague term "Near Field Communication" - is a technology that lets phones send small bits of info over short distances. And it's designed to do so without the prerequisite "pairing" routine of another short-range wireless technology, Bluetooth.

So if you have a recent Android phone - as in, one running version 4.0 or newer of Google's operating system - you can use its Android Beam feature to zap tidbits of data to another Android device with software of the same vintage.

Well, you should be able to. I can't guarantee that, based on my own experience. When I tried using Android Beam to share data among my LG Nexus 4 and two other recent Android phones - a Samsung Galaxy S 4 and an HTC First- the results were mixed.

The Galaxy S 4 and the Nexus 4 had no real hang-ups beaming Web addresses and Play Store listings back and forth. But the HTC phone might as well have been flipping a coin before deciding to send or receive those snippets of data.

In addition, an NFC phone can read NFC tags embedded in other devices. At Google's I/O conference in San Francisco last month, tapping my phone against my badge opened a Play Store link to download the schedule-management app Google provided for attendees.

And NFC can speed up sharing data via faster methods like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi - it enables two devices do their secret handshake to configure those connections without further intervention by the user.

NFC was also supposed to complement the credit cards in your wallet, but that effort has fallen far behind. It turns out that holding a phone over an NFC terminal in a store takes as long as swiping a credit card - longer if there's any hangup in the process.

Apple, for its part, has avoided NFC completely. That hasn't helped this technology's prospects: Last December, Juniper Research reacted to its continued absence on the iPhone by scaling back its predictions for NFC commerce from $180 billion in retail transactions by 2017 to $110 billion.

Tip: A Google program makes Android phones visible to a Mac but needs work

If you plug a new Android phone into a Mac with a USB cable, you may be surprised to see that it doesn't appear in the Mac Finder like older models did. That's because Google changed how Android devices present themselves to computers, starting with the 3.0 release - and while Windows still sees them as external drives, Mac OS X does not.

The fix is to download Google's free Android File Transfer app - but I wish Google hadn't left this program in a 1.0 state. You're stuck with one hierarchical view of files that allows no option to display thumbnail previews of data like photos or videos, much less inspect them with OS X's wonderful Quick Look tool. There's also no way to search through your phone's files from your Mac's desktop.